Spooky connection. Physicists forged a quantum link called entanglement between the mechanical oscillations of one pair of ions and another distant pair.

Credit: John Jost and Jason Amini/NIST

Quantum mechanics and its bizarre rules explain the structure of atoms, the formation of chemical bonds, and the switching of transistors in microchips. Oddly, though, in spite of the theory's name, physicists have never made an actual machine whose motion captures the quirkiness of quantum mechanics. Now a group from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, has taken a step in that direction by forging a mind-bending quantum connection between two mechanical widgets. Their devices don't look like electric drills or other familiar machines, however: Each is a pair of ions oscillating in an electric field, like two marbles joined by a spring.

The link the researchers created is called entanglement, and it has been made before between certain internal properties of quantum particles, such as the inner gyrations of ions. The new work extends that link to the actual motion of the ions, which is a kind of micro-analog of the swinging of the pendulum of a grandfather clock. "For the first time, the mechanical motion itself has been entangled," says Rainer Blatt, an experimental physicist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

To appreciate what the NIST researchers have done, an aficionado has to get his head around two very weird concepts in quantum mechanics. First, quantum theory says that an object can literally be in two contradictory states at the same time. So whereas an office chair can spin either to the right or to the left, a quantum particle like an ion can literally spin in two opposite directions--call them up and down--at once. That mind-creasing "superposition" state lasts until an experimenter measures the ion's spin, at which point the ion instantly "collapses" to one direction or the other. Weirder still, two ions can be put into these uncertain two-ways-at-once states and then linked up so that, even though it's impossible to say which way either is spinning, their directions are completely correlated. For example, if the first one is measured and collapses into the up state, the second one will instantly collapse into the down state, even if it's light-years away. That connection is called entanglement, and anyone who finds it hard to swallow is in good company: Einstein famously called it "spooky action at a distance."

To extend such a connection to mechanical motion, NIST's John Jost, David Wineland, and colleagues used electric fields to trap two beryllium ions and two magnesium ions. They then applied a magnetic field and pulses of laser light to entangle the spins of the beryllium ions. After that, they separated the ions into two beryllium-magnesium pairs, which would be their mechanical widgets.

During this process, the beryllium spins remained entangled, and the researchers next transferred that link to the motion of the pairs. To do that, they zapped each beryllium with a laser again to "rotate" the down-spinning half of its split personality back to up while leaving the up-spinning half untouched. But they tuned the energy of the laser so that as the down-spinning part of the beryllium's state turned, the light would also excite the ions in the pair to oscillate. As a result, each beryllium ion spun only up, but each beryllium-magnesium pair was left in a state in which it was both oscillating and not-oscillating. Moreover, because the two beryllium spins started out entangled, the two oscillatingnot-oscillating pairs ended up entangled, too, the researchers report this week in Nature.

"It's a completely amazing experiment," says Jack Harris of Yale University, one of a number of physicists striving to show quantum effects in vibrating beams and other "macroscopic" mechanical devices. The ion experiment hasn't beaten their efforts to the punch, he says, because although it entangles mechanical motion, the ions themselves are still quantum particles. "It's more the macroscopic than the mechanical that we're after," Harris says. Indeed, he and others hope to test whether some as-yet-undiscovered principle forbids quantum weirdness in objects containing many billion atoms.

For their part, NIST researchers hope to use ions to fashion a quantum computer that, thanks to quantum weirdness, could solve problems that stymie conventional computers. "A lot of the technologies we developed for this experiment are going to be crucial for making a quantum computer with trapped ions," Jost says. However, making a quantum computer will likely be even harder than making a rudimentary quantum machine.

Grey Eminence Friday, June 05, 2009I wrote a paper tens years ago and also have 2 patents (1998) on the technology.

Guest Sunday, June 07, 2009 Well, so much for 'polite and to the point.' This may be a record even for a discussion board.

Kenneth Epstein Sunday, June 07, 2009Entanglement should not be regarded as spooky action at a distance. It should be regarded as a quantum-style conservation law, in this case conservation of spin angular momentum. I explained this in my article Entanglement Untangled, Physics Essays 19, 299 (2006).

It can occur on microscopic, mesoscopic, macroscopic, and megascopic scales. An example of mesoscopic entanglement is explained by Jorg Wrachtrup in the article Schrodingers Cat is Still Alive, Nature Physics 5, 248 (2009).

On the largest scale, there can be cosmic cats in the form of entangled galaxies in the expanding universe, which is in a quasiclassical state, i.e., a quantum state that allows nondemolition measurements on superpositions and entanglements, which are not disturbed by observation. The universe is the ideal place to observe megascopic quantum effects.

Max Tegmark showed that the brain is in a quasiclassical state. It is quite possible that the brain is a quantum analog computer whose normal modes are the normal modes of the universe, which has a fractal structure consistent with the Biblical statement that God created man in His own image, so that man can be regarded as a fractal of God, explaining how Einstein et al. get those resonance-like flashes of insight into the nature of things.

Sincerely,

Kenneth J. Epstein Chicago, Illinois

Diogenes Sunday, June 07, 2009There is no "spooky action at a distance" and there is no "collapse" upon measurement. These are both quantum folklore.

pongosapiens Monday, June 08, 2009I remain fascinated that, as yet, there lacks the appreciation for the 'temporal elephant' in the room, only now be revealed at the quantum level. At some point, we must address 'time' as more than just perception or as an artifact of other, more fundamental factors. We may soon learn that the underlying explanation for "spooky" phenomena at the quantum scale, the reality of matter, as well as the apparent volume we call space may lie in that most troubling concept of Time.

Which would mean a mechanism for FTL digital communication exists. If we ever colonize planets around other stars,FTL communication may mean the difference between a single civilization or a mankind that is fractured into multiple civilizations.

Nobody has shown any ability to violate causality to date. That is, nobody has demonstrated any “effect” that happens before a “cause”.

Importantly, this matters with FTL anything. Say one half of an entangled pair was a considerable distance away, say 10 light seconds, from the other half. As of yet, there is no indication that “information” can be passed between the two faster than in 10 seconds. This doesn’t say that it can’t, just that nobody has been able to demonstrate it yet.

I’ve always thought the two entangled, separated particles are adjacent in some higher dimension, or even occupy the same space in the higher dim, making speed of light constraints moot. But I don’t have the quantitative IQ to even start on a mathematical exploration of the concept.

There have been some experiments that show quantum effects up to the speed of light, but nobody has yet found any indication that spooky action at a distance could exceed light speed. There are many experiments that examine the phenomenon, but none of them so far have broken the iron barrier of causality.

But I dont have the quantitative IQ to even start on a mathematical exploration of the concept.

Niether do I. And I'm better than the average bear at such higher math, and have an MS in Electronics Engineering. This is not easy stuff!.

It would help if one could get the mathematical physicists to speak English, now and again. At work we had an ABD (All but dissertation) from one of the big name schools. He didn't seem any brighter than most of the folks, but boy could speak quantum entanglement. Of course no one, save one or two other physicists from other divisions, could understand him.

20
posted on 06/08/2009 9:53:22 PM PDT
by El Gato
("The Second Amendment is the RESET button of the United States Constitution." -- Doug McKay)

Quantum theory does not predict causality violation. The apparent violation of causality is a result of trying to model the quantum events classically, which is a purely rhetorical exercise, and bound to increase confusion.

Kant’s theory was that space and time are just “the forms of understanding”. IOWs these are the way WE understand reality. The real world could very well not abide by “our” rules of space and time. When looked at this way, quantum mechanics don’t appear so mysterious.

“LOL, I sometimes wonder if Carlos hadnt read Berkley and Kant. Remember the incident he describes in one of his books involving the Mexican Air Force jet that seemed to violate causality?”

Well, he was known as a voracious reader of books, it being noted that wherever he lived was stacked to the ceiling with them.

However, his emphasis was always perception, not defining what was possible to perceive, it being far too complex to grasp all at once. So what we think is cause and effect may not be. Nor may they be in the right order.

Castaneda puts a great deal of emphasis on the unreliability of ordinary memory, but we are reliant on memory and assumptions to make the cause and effect association.

I remember a friend’s story of his meeting with a rural peasant in the Chiapas area of southern Mexico. The two went to a Pemex station far from the peasant’s home, and went into the restroom. The peasant was amazed and perplexed at water coming out of the sink faucet, but could not associate that with the act of turning the sink knob on and off. He had no grasp of the machinations involved.

From his point of view, turning the knob to produce water was like waving your hands in the air to make a magical gesture. It made no sense. He was shown it several times, but still tried to grab the faucet and shake it to make water come out.

As pitiful as it sounds, the peasant was really stuck in that mindset, and would have needed considerable training to learn even the basics of modern society. It was an alien zeitgeist.

However, we should not be very confident, either, because our mindset is just as contained. To make matters worse, there is an inherent limitation to mechanical complexity, in which fewer and fewer people actually understand what is involved. To the rest of us, it just “works”, but we have little or no idea why. Already our society is experiencing peripheral problems with legacy technologies that no longer have experts familiar with their use.

Ironically, Castaneda pointed to this as one of the reasons that the culture of the old sorcerers collapsed. Knowledge became complex and specialized, which made it brittle. Then people entered the situation with a different zeitgeist, and bonked them on the head.

"How does one determine that a particle is in superposition since measuring it causes the collapse into one state or the other?"

A particle can be described as also being a wave. When that's done, the particle is represented by a wavefunction. In short, the wavefunction squared gives the probability that the particle will be in some particular state. So, the calculation, which represents the behavior of reality, involves probabilities and not certainties regarding the values particular to the possible state of the particle. That means before each look at a particle, the particle is considered to be in a superposition of all the possible values it can have. That includes when one takes a second look at the same particle.

In cases like the one in the article though, the state is a single many particle state of a system that involves the values of 2 particles and the vaue of the state of the system. That means the values are limited and certainties and distinguishability enter the picture. So if one has information about one, or more of the particles that are linked by being in the same system state, they have information about the value(s) of other particle(s) by virtue of knowing the value(s) for the state of the system.

In the first case, the particles were free and even if they were not and there was a common state, no initial info was known. Since the laws of physics must be consistent, each measurement of a free particle will be consistent with a probability and not certainty. That applies even if it's the same particle and a measurement that indicated it was "up" was obtained. That behavior, or peculiarity of reality makes it appear as if the particle "collapses" back to a state that consists of a superposition of values. ...like an exposed card that's shoved back into the a deck that's subsequently reshuffled.

The details begin to be understood when one considers that "particles" arise out of fields and the particles are described by superimposed, time varying sinusoids. In general, it's the phase of the representative waves that change, that causes the "collapse" type description. Phase velocities can be faster than light, but all that obtains from that is a slower than light speed, wave envelope shape change. The particles represented by the amplitudes of the field(s) never move faster than light, nor do they communicate(exchange energy) faster than light, but the phases of the sinusiods that make up the field(s) envelopes do.

If one has 2 particles in a particular system, the state is known and a relavant pair value for one of the particles is known, the other must be fixed to the opposite, or some other value that maintains the overall fixed the system value(s). In general, that's because the particle's wave components are phased to accomodate their membership in the system with a particular state. System membership in the article is called entanglement. The particles in any such system can not be in a collapsed state, because they're constantly being looked at by the other particles in the system. ie. the phases of the sinusoids that represent the particles are locked so that the system's value(s) remain fixed.

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.